This week I took a look at my history of emails with my mother. Taking 4 years of emails, I ran the files through processing to determine the words that appeared most often, attempting to filter out the less interesting words (the, and, is, etc). What I generated was a file that creates an ellipse whose size and shading are based on the frequency of the word, words like thanks, call, check, around, and love! were some of my most frequent. I realized that the themes of these emails were slanted in a way I hadn’t expected – travel plans, product suggestions, and money concerns being out most often email topics. It dawned on me that the majority of our conversations took place over the phone, and therefor the more emotional content was usually communicated in that way, with more nuts and bolts, hard information being left to our emails.
